14 ms·

Britain Is a Developing Country

92 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

barry-cotter 3y ago
> the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about technological progress doesn’t make much sense, and at worst is a serious distraction.
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  That is quite the exception... The thing that is supposed to be the next big thing
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    It might be the next big thing, but there's pretty much a 100% guarantee that the UK will not be the driving force for it.
    - twixfel 3y ago
      We might even be, but rest assured that in any case, we will ultimately fail to capitalise on it. It's the British way.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    Is it? By its nature AI might add to Britain's GDP but seems unlikely to positively affect poverty or employment.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    The trouble with things that are supposed to be the next big thing is that, statistically, they are usually not. Even if it is, the UK has a history of fumbling such things. There was a time when the UK was fairly clearly the world leader in civil nuclear energy (MAGNOX, AGR), airliners (in particular the Comet), and civilian computers (LEO-1), more or less all at the same time. This... didn't last.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  British businesses are not very productive, technology is not a bad way to improve that.
  - osullivj 3y ago
    One of the reasons for the UK productivity gap is our oversize services sector. In services businesses meet demand by adding headcount, and falling demand is met with layoffs. Since UK hire and fire rules are more flexible than eg FR/DE that works for secs biz. We do still have a manufacturing sector, but much of it is invisible as its the arms industry, where Britain is still a big player. That's OK because the arms industry is less price sensitive than consumer manufacturing like cars, white goods etc. In those sectors strict rules on hire and fire has forced FR and DE industry to figure out how to scale by means other than headcount.
crop_rotation 3y ago
Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Compared to where? It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.
  - tinktank 3y ago
    The rest of the G8 I would presume.
    - eterm 3y ago
      It's not been the G8 for almost a decade now. If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
      - oska 3y ago
        And I would take Russia over the UK, even though my roots are British and I would enjoy delving into historical sites, etc, much more in the UK. But from looking on from Australia, the UK seems to be going downhill very rapidly, and has had a 'clown world' government for some time now. Russia, in contrast, only seems to be improving. (I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
        madeofpalk 3y ago
        You would rather live in Russia than the UK?
draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
LatteLazy 3y ago
That implies we are improving, but we are actually going back backwards...
iLoveOncall 3y ago
Having lived in multiple western EU countries and in the US, and now living in the UK, I can say that it's not developing, it's regressing. It is baffling how bad everything is, from public services (8 months of average waiting time in the NHS for something as benign as a lumbar puncture) to worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US). And now they of course committed economic suicide with the Brexit. I simply do not understand how anyone can think that the UK is a first-world country if they have ever lived in a real one before.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  Workers rights is a mixed bag. If you are a contractor, somehow you seem to opt out - for everyone else you get a decent amount of holiday (people in the US seem to just get two weeks!?).
- jstx1 3y ago
  > worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US) This seems very incorrect given that the UK has stricter laws around dismissal (the bar for losing your job is much higher), better minimum wage laws, more legally mandated holidays per year, paid time off for sickness, parental pay etc. - very basic things that the US doesn't have, at least not uniformly across states and industries.
  - mikrl 3y ago
    The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998. So it might be better now, but taking a larger context window… not so much. However, the social benefits around leave etc are definitely better but this is perhaps because of a more homogeneous culture than the US where some states like to work their fingers to the bone, and some states are more relaxed. The UK is definitely work hard, play hard and the only national variation seems to be the work getting done (blue vs white collar in US terms)
    - twixfel 3y ago
      There are more to worker's rights than the minimum wage, and saying that "The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998." as if its evidence for poor worker's rights in 2023 (or at least worse than the the US's) doesn't really make sense, firstly because that was 25 years ago and plenty can change in that time, and secondly because we are comparing worker's rights in 2023, not 1998.
laputan_machine 3y ago
> In the UK, the preoccupations of the “elite” – by which I mean the people, left and right, in politics, government and media whose views shape those of the country – are with things like Net Zero (above all), inequality, obesity, delivering Brexit, regulating Big Tech, data ethics and privacy, cutting immigration, gender and racial pay gaps, and other priorities that are either unrelated to, or diametrically opposed to, making the country richer.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  Fixing inequality obviously makes the country richer since wealth is concentrate amongst so few, redistricte that wealth to those who can't participate. All of these things make people better off somehow.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    The uk has less inequality than the US but middle class (and somewhat poor) Americans can still have better living standards in many ways just by being richer. Reducing inequality may improve median incomes a bit, but growing the economy could have a bigger impact (ideally the growth would benefit people at least reasonably equally in relative terms). Achieving net zero is much easier if you are richer and can therefore spend more on new energy generation, batteries, interconnects, car fleets, etc.
- soco 3y ago
  I was thinking that exactly these points were what makes a country rich(er) - citizen well-being, delivering on the promises, and such. What are your criteria for a richer country then?
  - dahfizz 3y ago
    > What are your criteria for a richer country then? Uh... Having more money? Country A is richer than Country B if and only if Country A has more money. Country B may have a great QOL, low obesity, low inequality, etc etc. But its not richer unless it has more money. That's kinda what the word means.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mkoubaa 3y ago
What the UK has going for it is that its population speaks the technology and science lingua franca, by default.
- blakblakarak 3y ago
  As does most of the educated populations of rEurope and India etc - I’m an English dev working in the EU and the fact that I speak English is of no real advantage over my peers.
  - mkoubaa 3y ago
    Yeah but the fact that you didn't have to learn English the same way they did to get to the point that you are now _was_ an advantage
  - oaiey 3y ago
    Publishing in Science is a definitely harder if you not only have to juggle the science but also the English sentence structure.
- throwaway72762 3y ago
  Yes, this. The UK has been subsidized for several decades by the dominance of the US and as a result English. Just as Canada and others in the Anglosphere.
gumballindie 3y ago
[flagged]
- wwilim 3y ago
  Either that or he might be Polish himself
- twixfel 3y ago
  Tired of this ridiculous attitude you see everywhere on the internet, "stopped reading at X" (which may actually be near or at the end of the article), "he said X therefore I can now casually discredit everything he says", "he said something factually incorrect therefore the whole article is wrong and I don't have to engage with it". And the arrogance of it too, as if in your head it's virtuous enough to be so closed and simple minded that it's worth announcing it to the world by making such comments. Just utterly juvenile nonsense.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    There are thousands, tens of thousands who compete for our attention on sites like this one via their hip Substack/Medium blogs. Them’s the breaks.
    - twixfel 3y ago
      That doesn't make any sense. The point is not whether or not we should dismiss nonsense, it's that often it's the "stopped reading at X" type comments that are the real nonsense
      - avgcorrection 3y ago
        People don’t have time or won’t make the time. They use heuristics (“nonsense”) to sort out the (in their opinion) chaff. With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
        3y ago
miroljub 3y ago
In order for a country to be developing, it has to develop itself first. If we look at the pace UK develops, a better term would be a stagnating country.
retrac98 3y ago
Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one. Public services and government that used to work well now don’t, and opportunities that everyday folk used to have they now don’t. It’s still a nice place if you’re in a good career, but the long term prospects don’t look good.
- sdsd 3y ago
  >Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one. There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
  - whymauri 3y ago
    The fact my dad grew up in Venezuela when it was the 4th wealthiest nation in the world per capita (granted, Europe was recovering from WW2) blows my mind. It was still top 20 by the 70s. [0] [0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-per-capita-in-1950 https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      It’s hard to be a petronation in the Americas.
      - ashconnor 3y ago
        Norway is probably the best managed petrostate. The key appears to be directing revenues into foreign investment and use the gains to pay for social programs over long periods of time, rather than dumping money into your economy.
        avgcorrection 3y ago
        In the Americas. Being a petronation on the edge of America’s backyard evidently works fine. America won’t try to coup that part of the world. (As far as I know.)
26fingies 3y ago
This article is missing an important part in the relationship between the developed world and the developing world which is exploitation. When companies start offshoring to the UK for cheap labor or taking its resources for pennies on the dollar we can start calling it a proper developing country.
- hollerith 3y ago
  The economics-literate are talking here.
- happymellon 3y ago
  Hate to break it to you, but that's already started. I know of a number of US companies that have started hiring UK employees because you can get principal engineers for £80k. It's really hard in this country to find anyone who is willing to break that 6 digit ceiling, our regressive tax policies keep it that way.
  - switch007 3y ago
    Our class system keeps it that way too. I can imagine the idea of paying someone 6 digits fills many company owners with disgust
ecshafer 3y ago
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.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  The money is there it's just that ordinary people don't have it.
- secondcoming 3y ago
  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.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  £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).
gnfargbl 3y ago
I agree with much of this article, but just as a counterpoint: > Americans could stop working each year on September 20th and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year. ...and yet the average American almost never stops working. That car wash manager in Alabama gets three weeks of PTO per year, and probably earns every cent of their $125k -- Buc-ee's is a pretty demanding employer, I think? Of course I would like to see the UK import the average GDP of the US, but I'm not sure I want the social structures that go along with it. I would rather be importing those from our former friends in the EU, with whom we actually have a lot more in common with culturally than we like to admit.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  > Moving here, I was surprised to see how carelessly Americans would “quit their job, take a break for a few months, figure things out.” > Or reading about the 70s, with stories of 20-somethings leavings their jobs to go hitchhike through California. > In France — with a 20%+ youth unemployment rate and incessant, neurotic talk about it — one does not quit their jobs to “figure things out” https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1668138067088080896 https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1668138067088080896
Xophmeister 3y ago
* Annual energy use per person in the US is 77,000 kWh; in the UK it’s 30,000 kWh. * Annual electricity generation per person is 12,700 kWh; in the UK it’s 4,800 kWh. Consuming/generating less energy is a good thing, no? If we presume energy is the limiting factor, then the other bullet points suddenly look a little different. For example, productivity: US $0.96/MWh²; UK $1.65/MWh².
- nradov 3y ago
  No. Throughout human history, consuming more energy has always been one of the best and most direct ways to improve living standards. Some current methods of energy production have negative externalities but that is a solvable problem.
- daedrdev 3y ago
  Many people are poor and don't consume the energy they idealy would in order to live a good life.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe. I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last year, ex-communist CZ has it for like 20 years) and quality housing is only accessible to millionairs." And if I am taling to a british person, there is like a 50% chance they will get offended and respond like "well then why are you here". I had similar responce on this very forum. And when "locals" bring this up publically, they get accused of 'talking britain down'. Kind of came up in the brexit debate under 'project fear'. I feel it will get a lot worse before people will finally get their sputnic moment and realise they are in a hole.
- twixfel 3y ago
  I am British and the best one is: "we are the 6th richest economy in the world". Absolutely thought terminating nonsense.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  When comparing with places like Czech Republic, people often forget that most of this area in "Eastern Europe" (this isn't Eastern Europe really) was very well-industralized until the mid-20th century when things went very wrong. So it is true, places like the Czech Republic have done well versus the UK...they have good policies in place, they are doing sensible things. For some reason though, the comparison is never made with places like Spain or Italy, most East European countries are now ahead of them and Britain is still ahead of them too. Even more strangely, no-one is suggesting that we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it? People outside the UK talk a lot about Brexit, the reason why it isn't really mentioned outside Westminster in the UK is because it isn't that important. We don't export much to the EU (we consume far more), it isn't a huge consumer market, it is shrinking, and there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" (such as meat processing)...it isn't happened. There has just been no real impact to speak of. The only exception was NI, which was a situation designed by the EU in order to place pressure on voters ahead of the 2019 election...which didn't work, and which has largely been unwound now that the EU has seen sense (and after several terrorist attacks in NI largely due to, well justified, fears that the EU was motivated by Ireland's desire to seize their country). After 2019, all the rhetoric basically disappeared because all the people pushing for a second referendum discovered they didn't have a job anymore (and everyone else who kept their job, said they never really supported a second referendum at all).
linuxftw 3y ago
The UK has almost no natural resources. As the developing world increases their heavy industry and engineering capacity, knowledge workers from the UK will be needed less and less. The UK also did quite a bit of lending to the developing world, and there's much more competition in that marketplace now as well.
evmar 3y ago
The comparison made between the UK and US states is one I was thinking about lately and which prompted me to make a little "compare EU countries to US states" app: https://evmar.github.io/states/ https://evmar.github.io/states/ (For example, through it I discovered that Ireland's nearest twin in both land and population is South Carolina.) Looking at the UK specifically, it's the GDP of California but with almost 2x the population, which comes out to a GDP per capita comparable to Mississippi.
noodlesUK 3y ago
I think one of the things that’s missing from these conversations is that whilst UK wages are far lower than the US, median wealth is actually way higher [1]. I would argue that this means that the UK is very much a country that is on a backslide, rather than a developing one. The other issue is that so much of our economy is limited to London. This would be less of a problem if we were a country like Greece where basically everyone lived in the major city, but the bulk of the population is spread throughout the rest of the UK. The UK has significant ongoing political issues that will take a long time to resolve, and it will take a long time for our relationship with the EU to return to some stable arrangement. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
- shisisms 3y ago
  [dead]
hattmall 3y ago
Pointing out the salary of a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees is cherry picking to the extreme. There are exactly 3 of those jobs in Alabama. It's not like it's a common job. The actual median income in Alabama is 27K almost 50% less than UK median income.
- barry-cotter 3y ago
  Alabama median household inching $52K https://datausa.io/profile/geo/alabama/ https://datausa.io/profile/geo/alabama/ UK median household income £29.4K https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom There are no US states as poor as the UK, Alabama included.
voxleone 3y ago
From the article: >>With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about (...) Considering that computing makes increasing use of neural networks, and that the new phase in capitalism will arguably be based almost entirely on this type of infrastructure, it seems to me, in fact, that the statement is contradictory in itself, paradoxical.
debacle 3y ago
Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail. Many will blame Brexit, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. Most of my friends in Britain have been either biding their time for retirement, trying to go literally anywhere else, or in a deep sort of quiet depression, usually aided by alcohol. These are well to do, white collar workers. It will be interesting to watch the country decline. Will we see the rise of extremists in Parliament? Will Parliament even matter? Will Britain become a proxy for reverse colonialism in the way that Italy has? Can the financial might of London persist, or will there be an exodus?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail. The UK is nothing like a “failed state” (the monopoly on legitimate violence is not seriously in doubt.) It may be experiencing decline in relative economic condition, but that’s hardly novel.
dahfizz 3y ago
> My claim is that the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. The author goes on to never support this thesis, and instead complains about British politics and that UK growth isn't quite as fast as the US. The UK has a higher GDP per capita than France. They are in no way a "developing" country. Does the UK need more tractors? Is there high unemployment (labor underutilized)? It does not seem so. What are the inputs and technology that the UK needs to improve?
- throwaway72762 3y ago
  GDP per capita is a poor measure. I have seen things this year that I would never have thought I'd see outside of wartime. Ambulances never showing up or taking half a day if they do. Rationing of basic vegetables at the store. The return of diseases of vitamin deficiency.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Sounds like they really committed to that austerity plan.
  - dahfizz 3y ago
    That's valid, but orthogonal. If you want to claim that British society is collapsing, I think you could write a convincing blog post. But don't try to claim that the UK's economy is structured more like Bangladesh than the US. Or, if you do, at least directly support that claim with some facts.
- jbjbjbjb 3y ago
  I feel like I agree with some conclusions but the lack of evidence and abundance of hyperbole make for a poor blog post. Going by his logic we’d be left with the USA as the only developed country.
_xnmw 3y ago
I travelled the world and learned a long time ago that the world, as viewed through macroeconomic lenses, is pure delusion. GDP does not correlate with actual quality of life by any stretch of the imagination. The definition of "developed" versus "developing" is purely arbitrary. Life is highly context-dependent, i.e. there are plenty of places and people in developed countries who are much worse off than some places in "developing" countries (try comparing crime + cost of living in Baltimore to Lviv). Furthermore, the religion of "economic growth at all costs" is considered harmful. Wellbeing is not measurable in dollars. Even adjusted purchasing power fails to take into account cultural expectations of ownership (say, for example, necessity of owning a car).
- golergka 3y ago
  > (try comparing crime + cost of living) in Baltimore to Lviv How are you including war crimes in this calculus? I'd rather be mugged than have a fascist rocket kill my entire family. Wonderful city otherwise though, coffee and chocolate shops across historical center especially.
cjs_ac 3y ago
The US was first to deploy large-scale electrification, and settled on 110 V @ 50 Hz. Everyone who wasn't buying their equipment from the US saw some flaws and went for 230 +- 10 V @ 60 Hz. First movers often end up committing to a suboptimal first draft version. The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different society with different traffic patterns. The housing stock wasn't affected that much but The War, and many of the larger older houses were built with the assumption that they're would be servants living there too. Heavy industry was reliant on a lot of manual labour, and didn't mechanise when the opportunity arose. The biggest problem is that democracy arose in the age of the humanities, when the sciences were idle curiosities for eccentrics. The revolutions in England - which negatively affected the rest of the archipelago - happened in the seventeenth century, too early for an urban middle class to have its say. The political establishment still has too many landowners - too much power is feels by the descendents of warlords. Most of the power is held by former members of Oxbridge debating societies, who've never had to do anything than throw ideas about. The Civil Service is run by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, with subordinate groups of 'specialists' who can never rise to the top. The same problem afflicts business: the country is run by people who are barely competent in arithmetic. US politicians are accused of insider trading and gerrymandering; British politicians don't have the skills needed to commit these crimes. Boris Johnson needed epidemiologists to explain percentages to him; the water companies have debts that are almost equal to the dividends they've paid out since privatisation. The solution is not political, but rather economic. Many of these businesses can be undercut by the use of industry knowledge. Software startups are cheap to run if the founders have a deep understanding of the problem, can build much of the solution themselves, and know who their customers are. In manufacturing, the Midlands and the North have long histories and community cultures surrounding these industries, and are desperate for someone to bring the factories back. Once technical people have money, the politicians can be bought. They're surprisingly cheap. In a mathematical sense, the problem is solved. We just need to stop waiting for the lawyers and classical philologists to do technical work, and do it ourselves. We're not getting value out of our elites, so we should get better ones.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Sounds about right from what I've experienced on the ground. The sheer lack of respect that Brits have for techncial and scientific education is insane. It seems everyone in the UK is trying to target some sort of Finance or Consulting adjacent role or some sort of Government role. Almost every decisionmaker that I interacted with there appears to be some kind of an Econ, Classics, or Law grad, while similar roles in the US or Canada would have someone with a STEM degree or military service experience.
johnnyjeans 3y ago
When people apply labels like these in this way, it always strikes me as thoroughly naive. Clicking through and seeing Poland get hit with the "developing" label basically confirms my suspicions that the author doesn't really know what they're talking about. This is the problem with focusing on single-dimensional abstract numbers which do a poor job of encapsulating complex ecosystems like an entire country. What's the water mark for a developed country? Iceland? Much of world is currently in an economic contraction. Britain has its fair share of issues that need to be addressed. Pretending like it's anywhere close to places like Bangladesh or Cambodia is actually insane. That's not to say it can't fall to that level of destitution, or that it won't if action isn't taken. Brexit was always going to be a great economic shakeup, and it had the disastrous misfortune of occurring right before COVID drove a bulldozer through everybody's economy. I'm just certain that hyperbole like this ends up being harmful in the long-run, because people begin to associate the extant problems with overblown panic and then minimize and underestimate them.
jacknews 3y ago
There is certainly some meat to the argument, Britain is much poorer than it could be, but I think the GDP/salary comparisons and so on are completely tainted by financial speculation and manipulation, a decade of asset price inflation etc, and do not reflect fundamentals.
mike_hearn 3y ago
Is there something weird going on with that Buc-Ees example? If I search for [buc-ees food service manager salary] on Google then Glassdoor snippets say things like "The estimated total pay for a Food Service Manager at Buc-ee's is $47,378 per year." and "The highest-paying job at Buc-ee's is a General Manager with a salary of $69,776 per year." which are far off the numbers in the poster which claims a General Manager is earning $150k-$220k/yr. If we take the Glassdoor data instead, then their Food Service Manager estimated total pay is £36,206.98 which is only slightly higher than the equivalent for McDonalds UK [1]. But I never heard of Buc-Ees before. Are they famous for paying their staff well or something? [1] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/McDonald-s-Restaurant-Manager-Salaries-E432_D_KO11,29.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/McDonald-s-Restaurant-Man...
- deathtrader666 3y ago
  Yes, the numbers quoted by the article's author for that company (or for that role in general) don't make any sense.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nunez 3y ago
I found this funny: > Or, as Mike Bird pointed out, a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees, a chain of gas stations and grocery stores, earns more ($125k/year) than THREE median UK salaries. Buc-ee's has a hardcore conservative Christian workplace culture (bested by Chick-Fil-A), but they pay their people well. They also give their employees a 401(k) and (terrible, compared to the UK) vacation time! Also, everyone loves to dunk on Mississippi, Alabama, and WV (and it is deserved), but Mississippi is a moderately large oil state, Alabama has a sizable military industry and WV is still big on coal and energy.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I thought this was a good article, despite the fact that I think the title is unfortunate (lots of comments here arguing over what a "developing country" means, but I think it's fair to just use the definition that is used and discussed in the article, i.e. a country that just has to use existing technologies more efficiently in order to increase economic growth, not necessarily invent something new). The thing that is most interesting to me, and also because I think it's a warning to the US, is the impact of housing costs. GDP per capita at PPP is 39% more in the US than the UK, yet UK housing prices are nearly twice (!) as much as the US on a per-square-foot basis. And I thought US housing prices were nuts! There is a good book, "Who Owns Britain", that points out that just 6000 landowners (mainly the Dukes, Earls and Barons a la Downton Abbey, but also large institutions and the Crown) own over half the land in Britain. That gross concentration of land wealth is basically strangling their economic dynamism. I'm curious, how can people in the UK with "normal" jobs ever afford home ownership? I mean, say I'm a senior software engineer with say 8 years experience - based on UK average salaries and housing prices I don't see how I'd ever afford a flat in a decent sized city if I wasn't already wealthy.

92 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

> the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about technological progress doesn’t make much sense, and at worst is a serious distraction.

ReptileMan 3y ago
That is quite the exception... The thing that is supposed to be the next big thing
- NikkiA 3y ago
  It might be the next big thing, but there's pretty much a 100% guarantee that the UK will not be the driving force for it.
  - twixfel 3y ago
    We might even be, but rest assured that in any case, we will ultimately fail to capitalise on it. It's the British way.
- dbspin 3y ago
  Is it? By its nature AI might add to Britain's GDP but seems unlikely to positively affect poverty or employment.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  The trouble with things that are supposed to be the next big thing is that, statistically, they are usually not. Even if it is, the UK has a history of fumbling such things. There was a time when the UK was fairly clearly the world leader in civil nuclear energy (MAGNOX, AGR), airliners (in particular the Comet), and civilian computers (LEO-1), more or less all at the same time. This... didn't last.
mhh__ 3y ago
British businesses are not very productive, technology is not a bad way to improve that.
- osullivj 3y ago
  One of the reasons for the UK productivity gap is our oversize services sector. In services businesses meet demand by adding headcount, and falling demand is met with layoffs. Since UK hire and fire rules are more flexible than eg FR/DE that works for secs biz. We do still have a manufacturing sector, but much of it is invisible as its the arms industry, where Britain is still a big player. That's OK because the arms industry is less price sensitive than consumer manufacturing like cars, white goods etc. In those sectors strict rules on hire and fire has forced FR and DE industry to figure out how to scale by means other than headcount.

crop_rotation 3y ago

Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Compared to where? It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.
- tinktank 3y ago
  The rest of the G8 I would presume.
  - eterm 3y ago
    It's not been the G8 for almost a decade now. If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
    - oska 3y ago
      And I would take Russia over the UK, even though my roots are British and I would enjoy delving into historical sites, etc, much more in the UK. But from looking on from Australia, the UK seems to be going downhill very rapidly, and has had a 'clown world' government for some time now. Russia, in contrast, only seems to be improving. (I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
      - madeofpalk 3y ago
        You would rather live in Russia than the UK?

draw_down 3y ago

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LatteLazy 3y ago

That implies we are improving, but we are actually going back backwards...

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Having lived in multiple western EU countries and in the US, and now living in the UK, I can say that it's not developing, it's regressing. It is baffling how bad everything is, from public services (8 months of average waiting time in the NHS for something as benign as a lumbar puncture) to worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US). And now they of course committed economic suicide with the Brexit. I simply do not understand how anyone can think that the UK is a first-world country if they have ever lived in a real one before.

stuaxo 3y ago
Workers rights is a mixed bag. If you are a contractor, somehow you seem to opt out - for everyone else you get a decent amount of holiday (people in the US seem to just get two weeks!?).
jstx1 3y ago
> worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US) This seems very incorrect given that the UK has stricter laws around dismissal (the bar for losing your job is much higher), better minimum wage laws, more legally mandated holidays per year, paid time off for sickness, parental pay etc. - very basic things that the US doesn't have, at least not uniformly across states and industries.
- mikrl 3y ago
  The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998. So it might be better now, but taking a larger context window… not so much. However, the social benefits around leave etc are definitely better but this is perhaps because of a more homogeneous culture than the US where some states like to work their fingers to the bone, and some states are more relaxed. The UK is definitely work hard, play hard and the only national variation seems to be the work getting done (blue vs white collar in US terms)
  - twixfel 3y ago
    There are more to worker's rights than the minimum wage, and saying that "The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998." as if its evidence for poor worker's rights in 2023 (or at least worse than the the US's) doesn't really make sense, firstly because that was 25 years ago and plenty can change in that time, and secondly because we are comparing worker's rights in 2023, not 1998.

laputan_machine 3y ago

> In the UK, the preoccupations of the “elite” – by which I mean the people, left and right, in politics, government and media whose views shape those of the country – are with things like Net Zero (above all), inequality, obesity, delivering Brexit, regulating Big Tech, data ethics and privacy, cutting immigration, gender and racial pay gaps, and other priorities that are either unrelated to, or diametrically opposed to, making the country richer.

stuaxo 3y ago
Fixing inequality obviously makes the country richer since wealth is concentrate amongst so few, redistricte that wealth to those who can't participate. All of these things make people better off somehow.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  The uk has less inequality than the US but middle class (and somewhat poor) Americans can still have better living standards in many ways just by being richer. Reducing inequality may improve median incomes a bit, but growing the economy could have a bigger impact (ideally the growth would benefit people at least reasonably equally in relative terms). Achieving net zero is much easier if you are richer and can therefore spend more on new energy generation, batteries, interconnects, car fleets, etc.
soco 3y ago
I was thinking that exactly these points were what makes a country rich(er) - citizen well-being, delivering on the promises, and such. What are your criteria for a richer country then?
- dahfizz 3y ago
  > What are your criteria for a richer country then? Uh... Having more money? Country A is richer than Country B if and only if Country A has more money. Country B may have a great QOL, low obesity, low inequality, etc etc. But its not richer unless it has more money. That's kinda what the word means.

deleted 3y ago

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mkoubaa 3y ago

What the UK has going for it is that its population speaks the technology and science lingua franca, by default.

blakblakarak 3y ago
As does most of the educated populations of rEurope and India etc - I’m an English dev working in the EU and the fact that I speak English is of no real advantage over my peers.
- mkoubaa 3y ago
  Yeah but the fact that you didn't have to learn English the same way they did to get to the point that you are now _was_ an advantage
- oaiey 3y ago
  Publishing in Science is a definitely harder if you not only have to juggle the science but also the English sentence structure.
throwaway72762 3y ago
Yes, this. The UK has been subsidized for several decades by the dominance of the US and as a result English. Just as Canada and others in the Anglosphere.

gumballindie 3y ago

[flagged]

wwilim 3y ago
Either that or he might be Polish himself
twixfel 3y ago
Tired of this ridiculous attitude you see everywhere on the internet, "stopped reading at X" (which may actually be near or at the end of the article), "he said X therefore I can now casually discredit everything he says", "he said something factually incorrect therefore the whole article is wrong and I don't have to engage with it". And the arrogance of it too, as if in your head it's virtuous enough to be so closed and simple minded that it's worth announcing it to the world by making such comments. Just utterly juvenile nonsense.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  There are thousands, tens of thousands who compete for our attention on sites like this one via their hip Substack/Medium blogs. Them’s the breaks.
  - twixfel 3y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. The point is not whether or not we should dismiss nonsense, it's that often it's the "stopped reading at X" type comments that are the real nonsense
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      People don’t have time or won’t make the time. They use heuristics (“nonsense”) to sort out the (in their opinion) chaff. With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
      - 3y ago

miroljub 3y ago

In order for a country to be developing, it has to develop itself first. If we look at the pace UK develops, a better term would be a stagnating country.

retrac98 3y ago

Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one. Public services and government that used to work well now don’t, and opportunities that everyday folk used to have they now don’t. It’s still a nice place if you’re in a good career, but the long term prospects don’t look good.

sdsd 3y ago
>Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one. There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
- whymauri 3y ago
  The fact my dad grew up in Venezuela when it was the 4th wealthiest nation in the world per capita (granted, Europe was recovering from WW2) blows my mind. It was still top 20 by the 70s. [0] [0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-per-capita-in-1950 https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    It’s hard to be a petronation in the Americas.
    - ashconnor 3y ago
      Norway is probably the best managed petrostate. The key appears to be directing revenues into foreign investment and use the gains to pay for social programs over long periods of time, rather than dumping money into your economy.
      - avgcorrection 3y ago
        In the Americas. Being a petronation on the edge of America’s backyard evidently works fine. America won’t try to coup that part of the world. (As far as I know.)

26fingies 3y ago

This article is missing an important part in the relationship between the developed world and the developing world which is exploitation. When companies start offshoring to the UK for cheap labor or taking its resources for pennies on the dollar we can start calling it a proper developing country.

hollerith 3y ago
The economics-literate are talking here.
happymellon 3y ago
Hate to break it to you, but that's already started. I know of a number of US companies that have started hiring UK employees because you can get principal engineers for £80k. It's really hard in this country to find anyone who is willing to break that 6 digit ceiling, our regressive tax policies keep it that way.
- switch007 3y ago
  Our class system keeps it that way too. I can imagine the idea of paying someone 6 digits fills many company owners with disgust

ecshafer 3y ago

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.

stuaxo 3y ago
The money is there it's just that ordinary people don't have it.
secondcoming 3y ago
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.
skippyboxedhero 3y ago
£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).

gnfargbl 3y ago

I agree with much of this article, but just as a counterpoint: > Americans could stop working each year on September 20th and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year. ...and yet the average American almost never stops working. That car wash manager in Alabama gets three weeks of PTO per year, and probably earns every cent of their $125k -- Buc-ee's is a pretty demanding employer, I think? Of course I would like to see the UK import the average GDP of the US, but I'm not sure I want the social structures that go along with it. I would rather be importing those from our former friends in the EU, with whom we actually have a lot more in common with culturally than we like to admit.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
> Moving here, I was surprised to see how carelessly Americans would “quit their job, take a break for a few months, figure things out.” > Or reading about the 70s, with stories of 20-somethings leavings their jobs to go hitchhike through California. > In France — with a 20%+ youth unemployment rate and incessant, neurotic talk about it — one does not quit their jobs to “figure things out” https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1668138067088080896 https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1668138067088080896

Xophmeister 3y ago

* Annual energy use per person in the US is 77,000 kWh; in the UK it’s 30,000 kWh. * Annual electricity generation per person is 12,700 kWh; in the UK it’s 4,800 kWh. Consuming/generating less energy is a good thing, no? If we presume energy is the limiting factor, then the other bullet points suddenly look a little different. For example, productivity: US $0.96/MWh²; UK $1.65/MWh².

nradov 3y ago
No. Throughout human history, consuming more energy has always been one of the best and most direct ways to improve living standards. Some current methods of energy production have negative externalities but that is a solvable problem.
daedrdev 3y ago
Many people are poor and don't consume the energy they idealy would in order to live a good life.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe. I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last year, ex-communist CZ has it for like 20 years) and quality housing is only accessible to millionairs." And if I am taling to a british person, there is like a 50% chance they will get offended and respond like "well then why are you here". I had similar responce on this very forum. And when "locals" bring this up publically, they get accused of 'talking britain down'. Kind of came up in the brexit debate under 'project fear'. I feel it will get a lot worse before people will finally get their sputnic moment and realise they are in a hole.

twixfel 3y ago
I am British and the best one is: "we are the 6th richest economy in the world". Absolutely thought terminating nonsense.
skippyboxedhero 3y ago
When comparing with places like Czech Republic, people often forget that most of this area in "Eastern Europe" (this isn't Eastern Europe really) was very well-industralized until the mid-20th century when things went very wrong. So it is true, places like the Czech Republic have done well versus the UK...they have good policies in place, they are doing sensible things. For some reason though, the comparison is never made with places like Spain or Italy, most East European countries are now ahead of them and Britain is still ahead of them too. Even more strangely, no-one is suggesting that we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it? People outside the UK talk a lot about Brexit, the reason why it isn't really mentioned outside Westminster in the UK is because it isn't that important. We don't export much to the EU (we consume far more), it isn't a huge consumer market, it is shrinking, and there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" (such as meat processing)...it isn't happened. There has just been no real impact to speak of. The only exception was NI, which was a situation designed by the EU in order to place pressure on voters ahead of the 2019 election...which didn't work, and which has largely been unwound now that the EU has seen sense (and after several terrorist attacks in NI largely due to, well justified, fears that the EU was motivated by Ireland's desire to seize their country). After 2019, all the rhetoric basically disappeared because all the people pushing for a second referendum discovered they didn't have a job anymore (and everyone else who kept their job, said they never really supported a second referendum at all).

linuxftw 3y ago

The UK has almost no natural resources. As the developing world increases their heavy industry and engineering capacity, knowledge workers from the UK will be needed less and less. The UK also did quite a bit of lending to the developing world, and there's much more competition in that marketplace now as well.

evmar 3y ago

The comparison made between the UK and US states is one I was thinking about lately and which prompted me to make a little "compare EU countries to US states" app: https://evmar.github.io/states/ https://evmar.github.io/states/ (For example, through it I discovered that Ireland's nearest twin in both land and population is South Carolina.) Looking at the UK specifically, it's the GDP of California but with almost 2x the population, which comes out to a GDP per capita comparable to Mississippi.

noodlesUK 3y ago

I think one of the things that’s missing from these conversations is that whilst UK wages are far lower than the US, median wealth is actually way higher [1]. I would argue that this means that the UK is very much a country that is on a backslide, rather than a developing one. The other issue is that so much of our economy is limited to London. This would be less of a problem if we were a country like Greece where basically everyone lived in the major city, but the bulk of the population is spread throughout the rest of the UK. The UK has significant ongoing political issues that will take a long time to resolve, and it will take a long time for our relationship with the EU to return to some stable arrangement. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...

shisisms 3y ago
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hattmall 3y ago

Pointing out the salary of a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees is cherry picking to the extreme. There are exactly 3 of those jobs in Alabama. It's not like it's a common job. The actual median income in Alabama is 27K almost 50% less than UK median income.

barry-cotter 3y ago
Alabama median household inching $52K https://datausa.io/profile/geo/alabama/ https://datausa.io/profile/geo/alabama/ UK median household income £29.4K https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom There are no US states as poor as the UK, Alabama included.

voxleone 3y ago

From the article: >>With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about (...) Considering that computing makes increasing use of neural networks, and that the new phase in capitalism will arguably be based almost entirely on this type of infrastructure, it seems to me, in fact, that the statement is contradictory in itself, paradoxical.

debacle 3y ago

Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail. Many will blame Brexit, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. Most of my friends in Britain have been either biding their time for retirement, trying to go literally anywhere else, or in a deep sort of quiet depression, usually aided by alcohol. These are well to do, white collar workers. It will be interesting to watch the country decline. Will we see the rise of extremists in Parliament? Will Parliament even matter? Will Britain become a proxy for reverse colonialism in the way that Italy has? Can the financial might of London persist, or will there be an exodus?

deleted 3y ago
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dragonwriter 3y ago
> Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail. The UK is nothing like a “failed state” (the monopoly on legitimate violence is not seriously in doubt.) It may be experiencing decline in relative economic condition, but that’s hardly novel.

dahfizz 3y ago

> My claim is that the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. The author goes on to never support this thesis, and instead complains about British politics and that UK growth isn't quite as fast as the US. The UK has a higher GDP per capita than France. They are in no way a "developing" country. Does the UK need more tractors? Is there high unemployment (labor underutilized)? It does not seem so. What are the inputs and technology that the UK needs to improve?

throwaway72762 3y ago
GDP per capita is a poor measure. I have seen things this year that I would never have thought I'd see outside of wartime. Ambulances never showing up or taking half a day if they do. Rationing of basic vegetables at the store. The return of diseases of vitamin deficiency.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Sounds like they really committed to that austerity plan.
- dahfizz 3y ago
  That's valid, but orthogonal. If you want to claim that British society is collapsing, I think you could write a convincing blog post. But don't try to claim that the UK's economy is structured more like Bangladesh than the US. Or, if you do, at least directly support that claim with some facts.
jbjbjbjb 3y ago
I feel like I agree with some conclusions but the lack of evidence and abundance of hyperbole make for a poor blog post. Going by his logic we’d be left with the USA as the only developed country.

_xnmw 3y ago

I travelled the world and learned a long time ago that the world, as viewed through macroeconomic lenses, is pure delusion. GDP does not correlate with actual quality of life by any stretch of the imagination. The definition of "developed" versus "developing" is purely arbitrary. Life is highly context-dependent, i.e. there are plenty of places and people in developed countries who are much worse off than some places in "developing" countries (try comparing crime + cost of living in Baltimore to Lviv). Furthermore, the religion of "economic growth at all costs" is considered harmful. Wellbeing is not measurable in dollars. Even adjusted purchasing power fails to take into account cultural expectations of ownership (say, for example, necessity of owning a car).

golergka 3y ago
> (try comparing crime + cost of living) in Baltimore to Lviv How are you including war crimes in this calculus? I'd rather be mugged than have a fascist rocket kill my entire family. Wonderful city otherwise though, coffee and chocolate shops across historical center especially.

cjs_ac 3y ago

The US was first to deploy large-scale electrification, and settled on 110 V @ 50 Hz. Everyone who wasn't buying their equipment from the US saw some flaws and went for 230 +- 10 V @ 60 Hz. First movers often end up committing to a suboptimal first draft version. The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different society with different traffic patterns. The housing stock wasn't affected that much but The War, and many of the larger older houses were built with the assumption that they're would be servants living there too. Heavy industry was reliant on a lot of manual labour, and didn't mechanise when the opportunity arose. The biggest problem is that democracy arose in the age of the humanities, when the sciences were idle curiosities for eccentrics. The revolutions in England - which negatively affected the rest of the archipelago - happened in the seventeenth century, too early for an urban middle class to have its say. The political establishment still has too many landowners - too much power is feels by the descendents of warlords. Most of the power is held by former members of Oxbridge debating societies, who've never had to do anything than throw ideas about. The Civil Service is run by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, with subordinate groups of 'specialists' who can never rise to the top. The same problem afflicts business: the country is run by people who are barely competent in arithmetic. US politicians are accused of insider trading and gerrymandering; British politicians don't have the skills needed to commit these crimes. Boris Johnson needed epidemiologists to explain percentages to him; the water companies have debts that are almost equal to the dividends they've paid out since privatisation. The solution is not political, but rather economic. Many of these businesses can be undercut by the use of industry knowledge. Software startups are cheap to run if the founders have a deep understanding of the problem, can build much of the solution themselves, and know who their customers are. In manufacturing, the Midlands and the North have long histories and community cultures surrounding these industries, and are desperate for someone to bring the factories back. Once technical people have money, the politicians can be bought. They're surprisingly cheap. In a mathematical sense, the problem is solved. We just need to stop waiting for the lawyers and classical philologists to do technical work, and do it ourselves. We're not getting value out of our elites, so we should get better ones.

alephnerd 3y ago
Sounds about right from what I've experienced on the ground. The sheer lack of respect that Brits have for techncial and scientific education is insane. It seems everyone in the UK is trying to target some sort of Finance or Consulting adjacent role or some sort of Government role. Almost every decisionmaker that I interacted with there appears to be some kind of an Econ, Classics, or Law grad, while similar roles in the US or Canada would have someone with a STEM degree or military service experience.

johnnyjeans 3y ago

When people apply labels like these in this way, it always strikes me as thoroughly naive. Clicking through and seeing Poland get hit with the "developing" label basically confirms my suspicions that the author doesn't really know what they're talking about. This is the problem with focusing on single-dimensional abstract numbers which do a poor job of encapsulating complex ecosystems like an entire country. What's the water mark for a developed country? Iceland? Much of world is currently in an economic contraction. Britain has its fair share of issues that need to be addressed. Pretending like it's anywhere close to places like Bangladesh or Cambodia is actually insane. That's not to say it can't fall to that level of destitution, or that it won't if action isn't taken. Brexit was always going to be a great economic shakeup, and it had the disastrous misfortune of occurring right before COVID drove a bulldozer through everybody's economy. I'm just certain that hyperbole like this ends up being harmful in the long-run, because people begin to associate the extant problems with overblown panic and then minimize and underestimate them.

jacknews 3y ago

There is certainly some meat to the argument, Britain is much poorer than it could be, but I think the GDP/salary comparisons and so on are completely tainted by financial speculation and manipulation, a decade of asset price inflation etc, and do not reflect fundamentals.

mike_hearn 3y ago

Is there something weird going on with that Buc-Ees example? If I search for [buc-ees food service manager salary] on Google then Glassdoor snippets say things like "The estimated total pay for a Food Service Manager at Buc-ee's is $47,378 per year." and "The highest-paying job at Buc-ee's is a General Manager with a salary of $69,776 per year." which are far off the numbers in the poster which claims a General Manager is earning $150k-$220k/yr. If we take the Glassdoor data instead, then their Food Service Manager estimated total pay is £36,206.98 which is only slightly higher than the equivalent for McDonalds UK [1]. But I never heard of Buc-Ees before. Are they famous for paying their staff well or something? [1] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/McDonald-s-Restaurant-Manager-Salaries-E432_D_KO11,29.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/McDonald-s-Restaurant-Man...

deathtrader666 3y ago
Yes, the numbers quoted by the article's author for that company (or for that role in general) don't make any sense.
deleted 3y ago
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nunez 3y ago

I found this funny: > Or, as Mike Bird pointed out, a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees, a chain of gas stations and grocery stores, earns more ($125k/year) than THREE median UK salaries. Buc-ee's has a hardcore conservative Christian workplace culture (bested by Chick-Fil-A), but they pay their people well. They also give their employees a 401(k) and (terrible, compared to the UK) vacation time! Also, everyone loves to dunk on Mississippi, Alabama, and WV (and it is deserved), but Mississippi is a moderately large oil state, Alabama has a sizable military industry and WV is still big on coal and energy.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I thought this was a good article, despite the fact that I think the title is unfortunate (lots of comments here arguing over what a "developing country" means, but I think it's fair to just use the definition that is used and discussed in the article, i.e. a country that just has to use existing technologies more efficiently in order to increase economic growth, not necessarily invent something new). The thing that is most interesting to me, and also because I think it's a warning to the US, is the impact of housing costs. GDP per capita at PPP is 39% more in the US than the UK, yet UK housing prices are nearly twice (!) as much as the US on a per-square-foot basis. And I thought US housing prices were nuts! There is a good book, "Who Owns Britain", that points out that just 6000 landowners (mainly the Dukes, Earls and Barons a la Downton Abbey, but also large institutions and the Crown) own over half the land in Britain. That gross concentration of land wealth is basically strangling their economic dynamism. I'm curious, how can people in the UK with "normal" jobs ever afford home ownership? I mean, say I'm a senior software engineer with say 8 years experience - based on UK average salaries and housing prices I don't see how I'd ever afford a flat in a decent sized city if I wasn't already wealthy.