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Ireland is full of resilient people who fought and bombed their way to their own freedom from the British. I think they will overtake the British economy before
by aprilthird2021 2y ago
Ireland is full of resilient people who fought and bombed their way to their own freedom from the British. I think they will overtake the British economy before 2825
- rsynnott 2y agoThe Irish economy overtook the British one by most measures some time ago (arguably partially as a result of the UK’s problems with regional development; the British economy, at this point, is verging on basically just being London and its immediate area).
- automatic6131 2y agoYes, the Irish economy is bigger than the British, all you have to do to get that answer is: count all the revenue of famous Irish corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel (and others) as Irish revenue, and divide by the respective populations (6M and 70M). Definitely do not think any further about these measures, just report them as Ireland ^ and UK v.
- switch007 2y agoLol exactly
- rsynnott 2y agoYes, GDP figures for Ireland and other small open economies (and, for that matter, _London_, which has the same sort of dynamic) are pretty useless; this is fairly well-known. However, Irish average wages overtook UK ones after the financial crisis, concrete economic activity is generally higher (for instance, Ireland builds about 2.5x the number of housing units per capita per year), the Irish state pension is higher, Irish unemployment is lower, Irish inflation is much lower, and so on. And it’s much starker when you compare Ireland to Northern Ireland (the bit of Ireland that the UK still runs), or, really, to the North of England or most other UK regions (again, really, the whole UK economy hangs off the south-east). The idea that Ireland would be _better off in 2025_ if it had stayed part of the UK is… pretty out-there, to be honest. The UK is simply very bad at regional development. Ireland _was_ an economic basketcase for a very long time, but then, realistically, so was most of the UK; more or less since WW2 the UK outside of London and the south-east has been looking pretty unhealthy.
- melesian 2y agoNational economic statistics -- GDP, GNI etc. only tell you so much. Measures of human wellbeing I'd argue tell you more. Ireland is ahead of the UK on every metric, from child mortality to longevity and everything in between -- and the gap is widening.
- automatic6131 2y agoYes, sipping on the taxes that really belong to 300M+ Americans can afford a very nice life for 6M people. Real shocker that. I'm sure everything is great in the Green island, which is why I keep encountering their youth working in restaurants and tourism industries abroad.
- switch007 2y agoDublin's GDP is a greater % of Ireland's GDP than London is of the UK's. Ireland has a "regional development" problem too
- rsynnott 2y agoYou’d expect that, though; the Greater Dublin Area isn’t far off half the population. And most of the GDP-skewing activity is in Dublin; Irish GDP numbers in general just aren’t very useful. You don’t see the same gap in wages and standard of living between Dublin and the west that you see between, say, London and Wales, though.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago...such a shame for all the kids that were killed, though.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoYeah I agree. I don't know why the Brits insisted on cruelty to that magnitude in every place they ruled. I mean yes historically it was common, but they continued it way later into history than most peoples did, or perhaps it's my naivety.