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...