alt Hacker News> Whether or not the Brits need our advice, we need to have our own internal discussion about what’s going on over in the UK and how we can use it to inform our own choices. And although there are still a few things to admire across the pond, the UK mostly now functions as a cautionary tale for the U.S. — yes, despite Trump, and guns, and high health care costs.
> Whether you think the UK has been falling behind America economically for a decade or for two decades depends on which set of prices you use to measure living standards. If you use the two countries’ national price indices, the UK has been growing slower than the U.S. since the financial crisis of 2008; if you use PPP prices, as Paul Krugman prefers, the UK’s relative stagnation has come only since Brexit in 2016:
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As someone who moved from the UK, to the US and back to the UK, my money goes a lot further in the UK.
I can afford to not work at all here. With health insurance, property taxes, and general outgoings per month being so much higher in the US (California, at least), there was no way I could retire early over there.
And whereas it's easy to hand-wave away "Trump, the healthcare, guns, ... " in a dismissive sentence, those things have real impact on a society and on the individuals living in that society. There's a reason [1] I moved away from the US, and will never return. Money-über-alles has its downside.
It's also worth noting (since the author brings it up) that the Mississippi comparison is pretty bogus. According to data from the Office for National Statistics and the US Census Bureau, median household wealth in Great Britain is substantially higher (around £300,000, or $403,000)[2] compared to the US ($175,000) [3] and Mississippi ($59,000). GDP and personal wealth are not the same thing.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217106
2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
3: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br...
>if you use PPP prices ...
it was still on the uptrend until 2020 when switching off the economy squashed all growth and not just in Britain but other major continental economies too, Germany has actually been in and out of recession multiple times since.
2016 added some turbulence to domestic politics and econ but until then our recovery from the GFC had been fast, occasionally faster than the rest of the G7.