9 ms·
Britain’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi
- dominotw 4mo ago[flagged]
- MyHonestOpinon 4mo agoThe people living in uk now are not the same people who were involved in past invasions.
- blakblakarak 4mo agoMove on and stop blaming us for your country’s problems (and we all know which country that is). Nobody who did any of the colonising is still alive
- fnordsensei 4mo agoThe people we should be genuinely scared of today are the ones that are looking at Britain's past and are thinking to themselves that colonization sure looks like a good idea that will work super well in modern times. Which not many actual Brits think.
- anon291 4mo agoI mean ... Sure but England has got to stop blaming other countries for their problems too. I mean look at the shitshow that was brexit in which the UK claimed the 20 or so other countries of the EU were at fault for their own issues. Beams and eyes or something
- blakblakarak 4mo agoI completely agree. Of course with Brexit bare in mind that the majority of the populace did not vote for it. Many of us are very pro-EU and believe in European social democracy.
- dominotw 4mo ago[flagged]
- Dependance 4mo ago[dead]
- kakacik 4mo agoIf you judge people by their ancestor's actions, there is literally no place, no human being that could be called moral or good. Neither you (or me), you just need to look far enough in time.
- dominotw 4mo ago[dead]
- inglor_cz 4mo agoAnecdotally, I meet some Polish returnees from the UK when I am in Poland. 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.
- gadders 4mo agoAt a large company I know, offshored Polish developers now cost more than ones in the North of the UK. So I think Poland has come up as much as parts of the UK have gone down.
- inglor_cz 4mo agoOh yeah, Poland has grown tremendously. I still remember Poland at the end of the 1980s when the Jaruzelski junta relinquished power: poor, shabby, nothing in the shops, badly dressed people looking for oblivion in wodka wyborowa. 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.
- ch4s3 4mo agoIt's odd to me that there's only a passing mention in one paragraph about energy costs effecting places like Stoke-on-Trent, and dwelling on austerity as though government cuts caused industry to leave. England has the highest electricity prices in Europe and that is surely what has been driving industry out of the country in the last 30 years.
- gadders 4mo ago[flagged]
- fssys 4mo agoenergy prices are firmly david camerons fault!
- gadders 4mo agoHe might have been a Net Zero nut, but I don't think he's the one stopping people fracking or drilling the North Sea. And it was Nick Clegg who said "no point building a new nuclear plant as it will take ten years to deliver"(about ten years ago).
- fssys 4mo agoIm referring to brexit and to his "cut the green crap" which left us horribly exposed to energy price shocks caused by Putin. North sea barely has any gas left and is not economically viable. And yes as you have alluded, most of the NZ policies the rw populists are raging about were drafted years ago under the conservatives.
- gadders 4mo agoOil companies seem awfully keen to drill in somewhere that is not economically viable. Net Zero has left us more exposed to Putin, not less as we don't produce much of our own energy and are in fact buying Russian oil via India, rather than drilling out our own.
- applfanboysbgon 4mo ago> living standards fall well below Mississippi’s GDP is not a measure of living standards. The NHS alone puts even the poorest Brit's living standards above Mississippi.
- ReptileMan 4mo agoA lot of fellow Eastern Europeans travel back home to get medical care. This is good testament about the quality of care and personal in UK - since ours are like take out of a horror movie
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- f6v 4mo agoEastern Europeans doing "medical tourism" is often powered by higher salaries in the West and lower living standards in the East. That's true not only for healthcare but for majority of services. You absolutely can get quality private care in the West - it's just much more expensive. The private care is also much less affordable for the locals in the East.
- ReptileMan 4mo agoSince when is NHS private care?
- bonzini 4mo agoThe three options are NHS, private local and private Eastern Europe. On the axes of fast, cheap/cheaper, near, you can pick two.
- f6v 4mo agoAt least in Germany, you can opt out for private health insurance. I don't know if that's the case in the UK. There're also many private hospitals in Denmark. And in the latter, you have right to get treated in those if there're no public healthcare options available in reasonable time. But both Germany and Denmark suffer from the same issues as the UK, of course. That is to say, private care is often available in the West. It just comes with a hefty price tag.
- jmyeet 4mo agoSo I've long had the theory that the primary cause of economic malaise is high housing prices. It makes labor more expensive. It makes everything more expensive. Treating houses as investments actually kills the economy. 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-of-everything https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory... [2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/7649016461775752470 https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76490164617... [3]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/7640487835438435606 https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76404878354...
- applfanboysbgon 4mo agoI'm not at all convinced that reasonable housing prices are a magic bullet for the economy. Housing in Japan is treated as a depreciating asset rather than an investment and is dirt cheap (outside of the most desirable parts of Tokyo, of course, but even then it's a pittance compared like-for-like with, say, desirable parts of NYC), and Japan's economic stagnation for decades is nonetheless well-known; it could be the dictionary illustration for "economic malaise". Of course, reasonable housing policy should still be pursued... just with basic human living standards being the justification rather than "it'll make our economy numbers go up" justification.
- jmyeet 4mo agoJapan's economic malaise is a big topic that's mostly driven now by a rapidly aging population. Why is it aging? Low fertility rates [1]. So why are fertility rates so low? It kind of started with the housing bubble in the 1980s that created a youth unemployment crisis (ie hikikomori), which has now come to the West where we now have a youth unemployment crisis (and thus NEETs). I found this [2]: > 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/japan/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap... [2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-symptom https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-sy...
- MemoryHoleHQ 4mo ago[flagged]
- f6v 4mo agoYeah it's all about white power and Polish success has nothing to do with massive EU investment /s.
- MemoryHoleHQ 4mo agoThat massive EU investment in Poland, per capita, is way less than many other countries. But per capita is a problem around here, I know. Just for clarity, here are the top 5 countries receiving the most from EU funds: - Latvia - Lithuania - Estonia - Croatia - Hungary Poland doesn't even make the top 5.
- codeduck 4mo agopiss off back to /r/reform mate.
- ch_sm 4mo agoSo to summarise: diversity, forced on the UK by some weird world order, is the reason for Britain’s economic decline. World-class analysis. Got it. Thanks.
- f6v 4mo agoThe irony is that braindead conservatives elsewhere try to convince me that The Great Replacement is orchestrated by the British.
- bborud 4mo agoI thought it was the 5G windmill lizard people this week. Do we not have the same edition of «The Nice And Accurate Tin Foil Hat Almanac»?
- gadders 4mo ago
- pkilgore 4mo ago[dead]
- alephnerd 4mo ago1. Both the US and the UK are large countries with significant federalism and devolved powers. I think subnational HDI is a better metric [0] instead of GDP per Capita. 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+4&years=2023&interpolation=0&extrapolation=0 https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+... [1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cr47x99k5n6t?post=asset%3Ab5f87068-237c-4d17-ad23-bd5ec36bb323#post https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cr47x99k5n6t?post=asset%3Ab5f8...
- jalapenoj 4mo ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 4mo agoMaybe stoades shouldn't burn innocent people's houses.
- dofm 4mo agoIncluding that middle-aged white supremacist American citizens with money or power like Musk and Vance are actively using their media mouthpieces to stir the pot. 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?)
- theghostboi 4mo agoWell the thing is the US more or less has a larger diaspora population that became integrated and successful and actually had good social mobility regardless of background. The UK has a lot of areas where mobility has been rather difficult. 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.
- swishbx 4mo agoGDP is a measure of economic output only. It doesn't say if that output is actually efficient or useful. For example, if everyone in a country is in perfect health, they might have a very small medical expenditure, which would negatively impact GDP.
- lucasRW 4mo agoTrue of course, this is ONE indicator, but a key one, and what matters is not so much that the metric now matches Mississippi. It is that it used to match the wealthiest states in the US, and now it matches the poorest. 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.
- tharmas 4mo agoYou forgot neoliberalism, Bank lending to fund asset accumulation by the wealthy with no lending for asset production.
- havblue 4mo agoThe article never said poverty is only a function of gdp, so I'm not sure who your comment is directed to. The article discusses gdp per capita, the devaluation of the pound, declining wages and the decline of health care all in the free paragraphs. If those things go in the wrong direction you can indeed be as poor as Mississippi.
- dofm 4mo agoI love the Atlantic but here we go again: Americans defining Britain in American terms as if they are the ineffable, indisputable default. 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.
- lucasRW 4mo agoMusk, Vance and Rubio are cheering for Europe to wakeup. Quite the opposite of what you say.
- dofm 4mo agoExplicit US foreign policy seeks to undermine the EU — literally meddling in favour of people who wish to see the EU federally weakened. 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).
- lucasRW 4mo agoHmmm... the only people that have "federally weakened" the EU are those that made that continent much poorer and less powerful than it was 20, 30 years ago. So you are correct partially: the US, throughout the second half of the second century, have seeked to weaken Europe and successfully done so (all indicators are worst now than they've ever been in Europe).
- pb7 4mo agoYou have a literal king, so maybe you shouldn't criticize them lest the coppers show up at your doorstep. Our "king" was democratically elected and has so little power he can't even organize a birthday party as you say, let alone do anything else.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- blini-kot 4mo agoI can't really even be smug about the framing anymore, this is like a developer deflecting blame for a bug by saying "oh I don't know, it was cursor/claude"
- fl4regun 4mo agoIn spite of this, I think I'd rather live in the UK than in Mississipi.
- tharmas 4mo agoAgreed. Its not just the size of the pie but how it is sliced up. 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.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoEspecially if one is sick, a child, has skin darker than a peachy beige, or has a mother tongue other than English.
- atx2bos 4mo agoNo idea where you're based, nor am I trying to argue there isn't racism in Mississippi. However, Mississippi has one of the highest percentages of black population per US states.
- CalRobert 4mo agoIs it possible that maybe Mississippi.... isn't terrible? I've never been there but is it just a given that it's a horrible place to live? I understand their schools have improved a good bit, at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
- cyanydeez 4mo agoeducating 10 years of children isn't going to erase generations of doing nothing.
- glimshe 4mo agoLike most of the South, where I proudly live, it's a place where the poor and rich live very different lives. It has pretty bad places (just like the UK), but it has areas with great quality of life and is far from "horrible".
- black6 4mo agoI've lived in Mississippi Hill Country, the Delta, and the Mississippi coast. The Delta is awful. Mechanization in farming and fleeing industry left the population behind to wither. North MS and the coast both have great things going for them and are relatively nice places to live, especially when cost of living is taken into account.
- alephnerd 4mo ago> Is it possible that maybe Mississippi.... isn't terrible 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+4&years=2023&interpolation=0&extrapolation=0 https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+... [1] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/FRA/?levels=1+4&years=2023&interpolation=0&extrapolation=0 https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/FRA/?levels=1+4&ye... [2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/ITA/?levels=1+4&years=2023&interpolation=0&extrapolation=0 https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/ITA/?levels=1+4&ye... [3] - https://time.com/article/2026/06/10/belfast-protests-erupt-knife-attack-violence-spreads-online-discourse-immigration/ https://time.com/article/2026/06/10/belfast-protests-erupt-k...
- vermooten 4mo agoHS2 Phase 1 as a whole required 8,276 public-body consents, but those were not 8,000 permits for the bat structure.