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The UK is really, really poor compared to the US.
by loeg 2y ago
The UK is really, really poor compared to the US.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.
- titanomachy 2y ago> canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year Couldn't this largely be explained by their importing huge amounts of low-income people?
- throwaway48476 2y agoOf course. Canadians are still getting poorer every year and that's the salient point.
- titanomachy 2y agoSure, but expanding the definition of “Canadian” to include people who were already poor is a bit different from people who were already Canadian becoming poorer.
- n4r9 2y agoI don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.
- titanomachy 2y ago> GDP per capita does not go down It does in Canada, I think that’s what he meant
- n4r9 2y agoIt doesn't go down every year in Canada either.
- foldr 2y agoGDP per capita has not gone down every year in Canada or in the UK: https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=The%20GDP%20per%20Capita%20in,source%3A%20World%20Bank https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=T... https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita (Click the button to check the 25 year view.)
- titanomachy 2y agoAccording to Stats Canada, “Real GDP per capita has now declined in five of the past six quarters”, so fair to say it’s currently declining. This was news to me. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024004/article/00001-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024004/artic...
- foldr 2y agoOP’s post clearly suggested a long term trend of declining GDP per capita (“every year”), which is not the case.
- foldr 2y agoThe UK is poorer than the US, but US software engineering salaries are an outlier. The difference is not as big as that comparison would suggest.
- gspetr 2y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/03/britain-economy-society https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/03/britai... "another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
- foldr 2y agoYes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.) None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
- titanomachy 2y agoThe above comparison was actually aerospace engineering, not software.
- foldr 2y agoRegardless, Americans are not five times richer than Brits by any reasonable measure. The salaries in the comparison upthread are outliers. The exact figure obviously depends on which stat you look at, but Americans are around 50% richer by most measures.