Both GDP and living standards are discussed in the article. The NHS is addressed near the beginning as proof of the deteriorating condition of living standards. 1/10th of the population are on a waiting list for care. 1/10th have done DIY dental work.
You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?
Preventative interventions can; preventing obesity falls under the purview of healthcare departments like the NHS.
But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...
I don't think it's a matter of better or worse quality, the Healthcare being expensive and for profit in Mississippi leads to people just not going to the doctor at all
An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.
So the same quality and reach of the public transit in rural Japan and rural USA? The same percentage of net income spent on the similar healthcare procedures in rural Japan and rural USA? The same quality and percentage of net income spent on the education in rural Japan and rural USA? I have doubts.
GDP is one of the most meaningless ways to compare the standard of living in two countries. It can only compare their financial position and it's questionably good at that.
> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
That article fails to note that the USA lags behind the UK in global rankings of overall dental health. We are either joint fourth (Sweden) or fifth; the USA is ninth.
NHS dentists are scarce for policy reasons that are inexcusible. But private dental care here is not actually particularly expensive unless you want it to be, and it is good.
(Again, don't imagine that "private healthcare" in the UK is expensive in the way it is in the USA).
We have our problems and they are escalating in some ways, but my main issue with this article is that again US writers tend to assume that words and terminology have their US meaning and broader connotations.
Standard of living comparisons that use US concepts (car ownership, air conditioning ownership, even in the recent past comparing how many people dry their clothes outdoors, which is common American poverty indicator) just cannot capture the nuance in a way that makes sense.
>The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care
This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
It is paywalled. I only had access to the first two paragraphs. Regardless, that description changes nothing. "The NHS is overburdened" is a problem, but it is still better than not having the NHS at all.
The unfortunate thing is though that general medical care under the NHS is a complete postcode lottery - if you're lucky enough to be registered with a decent practice you're okay, if you're not you're screwed.
On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The article outlines how hard it is to get dental care in the UK, which just isn't going to be as difficult in Mississippi. Mississippi's Medicaid covers emergency dental care so it's available, you just probably have to drive, but that's true of most things in most of the US. The real healthcare issue in Mississippi is the shortage of providers, which is also an issue in most of the UK.
The article outline that 1 in 10 people in the UK have done DIY emergency dental care, wich suggests strongly that the availability is less good than advertised. In fact a large portion of the article is about growing NHS wait times.
I know about 6-700 people over here in the UK, I live in a poor-ish Northern town and I don't know a single person who's done "DIY dental care". Not one.
Now 600 people is a lot smaller than 60 million, I don't doubt there are people who have pulled a tooth out, but to get those sorts of figures, you'd have to count all the kids who pull out a tooth with a bit of string to get £1 from the tooth fairy.
This comparison of the large Western European economies (most frequently Germany) to America's poorest state based on GDP-per-capita is all the rage on the US right at the moment.
It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years.
Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh
Some people are just all-in on the moronic MAGA nationalism and refuse to earnestly engage with critiques of the US. America is always better than Europe, even when it's not.
The gap is nowhere near that large when controlling for the difference in demographics. Despite that, America is undeniably obese which is easily the largest factor contributing to life expectancy.
A 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
Eastern 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.
It's fascinating to see to what lengths people will go to maintain their denial.
As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.
The same in the USA. The other day I saw someone claim that people have it better now because they have more phones and TVs, and that's good even though they can't get cars and houses.
It'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.
He 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).
Im 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.
Oil 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.
GDP 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.
The 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.
True 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.
Is 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
Like 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".
I'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.
> 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] like Normandy and 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.
I 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"
I 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.
I doubt there are many people at the Atlantic who voted for Trump and the author has worked for the Economist before. So I'm not sure what you're asking for, unless you're saying he should move back to London if he's to write about the UK.
Ahh well if he worked for the Economist that explains it. Sorry, I didn't realise.
I didn't suggest that Trump voting was the problem. Americans of literally all political persuasions have simply no idea how this country actually works. There is a level of ignorance that is often comical.
The reverse is not true in quite the same way. If you were to ask an American to name UK political figures, most cannot. Whereas our coverage of your political system is such that anyone with a passing interest in politics can _really_ get into it on US politics; it's a very asymmmetric experience that is hard to explain.
You 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.
> so maybe you shouldn't criticize them lest the coppers show up at your doorstep.
Not sure what you imagine the UK is like but we literally don't have lèse majesté laws, so there is no legal basis for that to happen. It does not happen. (And no, merely saying it online isn't a basis either).
Apart from stupid comedy overreactions at the coronation protests that exasperated us all and saw significant pushback (our police lean so firmly against use of force at protests that they sometimes do silly things in the name of stopping "disruption"), we have a rich, varied, centuries-long tradition of being able to soundly criticise our monarchy.
Indeed we did so with such efficiency recently that our king actually listened and took his own brother's title, powers and roles away.
Meanwhile there are people in the USA fighting lawsuits over being falsely imprisoned for saying true things about Charlie Kirk.
Anecdotally, 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.
At 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.
Oh 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.
So 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.
I'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.
Japan makes me feel very confused about what economic statistics actually mean. People have great housing, beautiful and safe neighborhoods, ample access to the world's best transit, tons of entertainment and cultural products to access, excellent education and one of the longest life expectancies. Sure, they maybe have some minor problems. But I suspect that if an alien came down to Earth, toured all the countries and then was asked to rank which ones it thought were the richest without looking up economic stats I'd expect it would rank Japan near the top.
High housing prices will kill a good economy but having moderate rents will not somehow jumpstart a bad economy. JP's slump isn't evidence against housing theory of everything.
I do agree. I'm actually of the opinion that the economy is in generally good shape and that "number go up" should not be the end goal. It is abundantly clear that real living standards on the ground are completely divorced from the obsession with infinite growth.
Japan'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.
Hikikomori are ~0.5% of the population according to a 2015 government survey's estimate. Blaiming fertility rates, a youth unemployment crisis, and economic stagnation on NEETs is literally insane. [2] is a completely LLM-generated blog post. Your pet theories about how economies work should probably be grounded in more than 5 minutes of taking whatever bullshit you read on the internet as truth.
> Treating houses as investments actually kills the economy.
Failure is always a possibility, but historically it hasn't killed the economy, it has rebalanced the economy; seeing businesses and people reduce their concentration in a specific area as they fan out into lower cost areas. Which is a rather useful function. This is why we're not all living in one giant heap somewhere in Africa.
The 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.
I 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.
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.
If 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.
So 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.
1. 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 at the State level), 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.
> 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.
Both GDP and living standards are discussed in the article. The NHS is addressed near the beginning as proof of the deteriorating condition of living standards. 1/10th of the population are on a waiting list for care. 1/10th have done DIY dental work.
You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?
Considering Mississippi has 7-8 years less of life expectancy than the UK, the onus of proving who has better healthcare is probably not on the Brits.
To be fair, meaningful changes to life expectancy numbers tend to take longer to manifest.
For instance, if you cut preventive healthcare for younger parts of the population that will take longer to manifest.
I wish there were more modeling tools available to run what-if simulations on public data.
It's because Mississippi is the second most obese state at 40% of the pop. Healthcare can't fix that.
Preventative interventions can; preventing obesity falls under the purview of healthcare departments like the NHS.
But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...
Eli Lilly may have a different point of view on that!
I don't think it's a matter of better or worse quality, the Healthcare being expensive and for profit in Mississippi leads to people just not going to the doctor at all
> GDP is not a measure of living standards.
An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.
Tokyo and Kansai, sure. But a lot of rural Japan is pretty clearly in line with rural US states.
So the same quality and reach of the public transit in rural Japan and rural USA? The same percentage of net income spent on the similar healthcare procedures in rural Japan and rural USA? The same quality and percentage of net income spent on the education in rural Japan and rural USA? I have doubts.
Japan has less trading houses at increasingly high valuations to pump up their GDP.
> walk around Japan
Ok and then go into the average person's living quarters.
There are many non-trivial differences that make these comparisons complex; GDP is about as good as you can get.
GDP is one of the most meaningless ways to compare the standard of living in two countries. It can only compare their financial position and it's questionably good at that.
Maybe should actually read the article.
> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
That article fails to note that the USA lags behind the UK in global rankings of overall dental health. We are either joint fourth (Sweden) or fifth; the USA is ninth.
NHS dentists are scarce for policy reasons that are inexcusible. But private dental care here is not actually particularly expensive unless you want it to be, and it is good.
(Again, don't imagine that "private healthcare" in the UK is expensive in the way it is in the USA).
We have our problems and they are escalating in some ways, but my main issue with this article is that again US writers tend to assume that words and terminology have their US meaning and broader connotations.
Standard of living comparisons that use US concepts (car ownership, air conditioning ownership, even in the recent past comparing how many people dry their clothes outdoors, which is common American poverty indicator) just cannot capture the nuance in a way that makes sense.
>The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care
This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
It is paywalled. I only had access to the first two paragraphs. Regardless, that description changes nothing. "The NHS is overburdened" is a problem, but it is still better than not having the NHS at all.
https://archive.ph/FMSfO
The unfortunate thing is though that general medical care under the NHS is a complete postcode lottery - if you're lucky enough to be registered with a decent practice you're okay, if you're not you're screwed.
On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
Yes, cannot say highly enough of the emergency medicine. Timely and effective.
To make it worse, this is gdp per capita, a pretty worthless statistic. Someone else below points out the comparison with Japan.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The article outlines how hard it is to get dental care in the UK, which just isn't going to be as difficult in Mississippi. Mississippi's Medicaid covers emergency dental care so it's available, you just probably have to drive, but that's true of most things in most of the US. The real healthcare issue in Mississippi is the shortage of providers, which is also an issue in most of the UK.
Emergency dental treatment is available in the UK "within 24 hours or 7 days, depending on your symptoms."
https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/how-to-find-an-nhs-...
The article outline that 1 in 10 people in the UK have done DIY emergency dental care, wich suggests strongly that the availability is less good than advertised. In fact a large portion of the article is about growing NHS wait times.
I know about 6-700 people over here in the UK, I live in a poor-ish Northern town and I don't know a single person who's done "DIY dental care". Not one.
Now 600 people is a lot smaller than 60 million, I don't doubt there are people who have pulled a tooth out, but to get those sorts of figures, you'd have to count all the kids who pull out a tooth with a bit of string to get £1 from the tooth fairy.
This comparison of the large Western European economies (most frequently Germany) to America's poorest state based on GDP-per-capita is all the rage on the US right at the moment.
It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years.
Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh
Some people are just all-in on the moronic MAGA nationalism and refuse to earnestly engage with critiques of the US. America is always better than Europe, even when it's not.
Life expectancy is complex and there's more to it than healthcare. Certainly habits, exercise, diet, etc. are a big part of it as well.
Like allowing to spray lead from airplane exhaust over the populated areas, right? Oh wait...
The gap is nowhere near that large when controlling for the difference in demographics. Despite that, America is undeniably obese which is easily the largest factor contributing to life expectancy.
A 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
Eastern 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.
Since when is NHS private care?
It's fascinating to see to what lengths people will go to maintain their denial.
As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.
The same in the USA. The other day I saw someone claim that people have it better now because they have more phones and TVs, and that's good even though they can't get cars and houses.
It'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.
Honestly at this point if we found out Ed Milliband was a Chinese/Russian agent trying to damage the UK economy I wouldn't be surprised.
Sorry, when was Ed Milliband in power again?
Oh look: https://www.gov.uk/government/people/ed-miliband
"Ed Miliband was appointed Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero on 5 July 2024. He was elected MP for Doncaster North in May 2005."
energy prices are firmly david camerons fault!
He 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).
Im 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.
Oil 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.
GDP 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.
The 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.
True 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.
Is 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
Like 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".
I'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.
educating 10 years of children isn't going to erase generations of doing nothing.
> 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] like Normandy and Italy [2]. Basically, not great but also not some third world despair of darkness.
Most likely, if a deeper subnational analysis was done of Mississippi, there would be a stark difference in HDIs between the unindustrialized Delta and industrialized North and Gulf Coast.
That said, at least it's been decades since Mississippi has seen a race riot where rioters were purposely burning black people's houses like what we saw in Belfast last night [3].
Plenty of Brits need to do some soul searching. There's a reason why even despite Trump, everyone who is eligible for an O1 tries to come to the US over London. Comparing the UK with Mississippi based on GDP per Capita is facetious, but the UK is similar to Mississippi in many other ways.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+...
[1] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/FRA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/ITA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[3] - https://time.com/article/2026/06/10/belfast-protests-erupt-k...
I 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"
I 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.
UK!! where tweeting the "wrong" thing gets you longer prison sentences than violent criminals.
It really does not. Honestly, seriously, really does not.
I doubt there are many people at the Atlantic who voted for Trump and the author has worked for the Economist before. So I'm not sure what you're asking for, unless you're saying he should move back to London if he's to write about the UK.
Ahh well if he worked for the Economist that explains it. Sorry, I didn't realise.
I didn't suggest that Trump voting was the problem. Americans of literally all political persuasions have simply no idea how this country actually works. There is a level of ignorance that is often comical.
The reverse is not true in quite the same way. If you were to ask an American to name UK political figures, most cannot. Whereas our coverage of your political system is such that anyone with a passing interest in politics can _really_ get into it on US politics; it's a very asymmmetric experience that is hard to explain.
You 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.
> so maybe you shouldn't criticize them lest the coppers show up at your doorstep.
Not sure what you imagine the UK is like but we literally don't have lèse majesté laws, so there is no legal basis for that to happen. It does not happen. (And no, merely saying it online isn't a basis either).
Apart from stupid comedy overreactions at the coronation protests that exasperated us all and saw significant pushback (our police lean so firmly against use of force at protests that they sometimes do silly things in the name of stopping "disruption"), we have a rich, varied, centuries-long tradition of being able to soundly criticise our monarchy.
Indeed we did so with such efficiency recently that our king actually listened and took his own brother's title, powers and roles away.
Meanwhile there are people in the USA fighting lawsuits over being falsely imprisoned for saying true things about Charlie Kirk.
Musk, Vance and Rubio are cheering for Europe to wakeup. Quite the opposite of what you say.
In spite of this, I think I'd rather live in the UK than in Mississipi.
Anecdotally, 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.
At 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.
Oh 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.
So 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...
[2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76490164617...
[3]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76404878354...
I'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.
Japan makes me feel very confused about what economic statistics actually mean. People have great housing, beautiful and safe neighborhoods, ample access to the world's best transit, tons of entertainment and cultural products to access, excellent education and one of the longest life expectancies. Sure, they maybe have some minor problems. But I suspect that if an alien came down to Earth, toured all the countries and then was asked to rank which ones it thought were the richest without looking up economic stats I'd expect it would rank Japan near the top.
High housing prices will kill a good economy but having moderate rents will not somehow jumpstart a bad economy. JP's slump isn't evidence against housing theory of everything.
Japan's "malaise" is fiscal, an outcome of one way to analyze the public balance sheet. Japan's standards of living remain exceptionally high.
I do agree. I'm actually of the opinion that the economy is in generally good shape and that "number go up" should not be the end goal. It is abundantly clear that real living standards on the ground are completely divorced from the obsession with infinite growth.
Japan'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/jap...
[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-sy...
Hikikomori are ~0.5% of the population according to a 2015 government survey's estimate. Blaiming fertility rates, a youth unemployment crisis, and economic stagnation on NEETs is literally insane. [2] is a completely LLM-generated blog post. Your pet theories about how economies work should probably be grounded in more than 5 minutes of taking whatever bullshit you read on the internet as truth.
> Treating houses as investments actually kills the economy.
Failure is always a possibility, but historically it hasn't killed the economy, it has rebalanced the economy; seeing businesses and people reduce their concentration in a specific area as they fan out into lower cost areas. Which is a rather useful function. This is why we're not all living in one giant heap somewhere in Africa.
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Move 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
> and we all know which country that is
lol karma catching up to racists. You dont get to tell ppl when to "move on".
The 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.
I 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
I 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.
The people living in uk now are not the same people who were involved in past invasions.
If 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.
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piss off back to /r/reform mate.
So 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.
The massive wave of migration in the last few years has decreased GDP per person.
The irony is that braindead conservatives elsewhere try to convince me that The Great Replacement is orchestrated by the British.
I 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»?
Yeah it's all about white power and Polish success has nothing to do with massive EU investment /s.
That 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.
racist filth
1. 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 at the State level), developmental indicators between much of the US and the UK are the same.
2. After seeing the riots in Belfast last night where rioters specifically targeted and burned the homes of Black residents [1], I'd be inclined to agree that the United Kingdom does have some hallmarks of Mississippi, and in some sense is worse. We haven't had targeted race riots in the US for decades. The UK has had 3 in the last year.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cr47x99k5n6t?post=asset%3Ab5f8...
Including that middle-aged white supremacist American citizens with money or power are using their media mouthpieces to stir the pot.
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Maybe stoades shouldn't burn innocent people's houses.