Britain’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi
theatlantic.comI 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.
>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.
I don't share your enthusiasm in this being a good thing. In fact, this is a common problem I've noticed over the last decade in that Europeans feel like they know the US and are qualified to comment on issues by virtue of consuming movies and political media of a certain spin (like all media). You are simply consuming someone's opinion with little to no opportunity to validate it against day to day life.
Oh I don't think it is a good thing, at all.
But this time round in particular, it is absolutely a thing. People in Denmark, for example, have no choice but to understand at some level the internal cabinet politics of the USA. Because they need to know, when JD Vance turns up, who is he actually talking for? What does it mean if he refuses to rule something out? What real power is there in his confidence?
It's the same as needing to know, if Biden offered something, what was the likelihood of it simply being torn up by a returning Trump.
The asymmetry comes from scale: the UK and individual EU countries needed to know a lot more about the internal directions of a country six times our size, because those internal directions will very much affect us.
It is changing, because the EU is finding its collective voice this time round, whereas in Trump 1 they still had to worry that individual countries might not wish to follow a party line. Now everyone understands the stakes of not having an aligned voice, and the UK is in a position to at least sing the harmony.
Always wondered whether that was driven by desire for enlightenment or one of caution.
If I were in a fine China shop, I would be mindful of the location of the bull running amok.
I mean to some extent we want to understand America because it is where — at least until recently — we all assumed we were culturally headed. When I was a kid there was a strong feeling (incorrect, in retrospect) that the USA was sort of five, ten years ahead on everything good and bad — shopping malls, carphones, hip hop, fashion, cinema, sci-fi. That everything was less expensive and more vibrant and fun. And I think Gen X in particular has grown up feeling that understanding the USA is valuable and enjoyable in that way (because it was). Gen X here in the UK and Europe loved the USA as kids, as the boomers had.
There was a blip during the Bush Jr era where I think our view of the USA fell into a sort of mixture of pity and anger, and we began to understand that there were, from our perspective, two Americas that fall either side of us; one more brash and progressive than us and one that loathed us that we saw as regressive and cruel (overly religious etc.).
Now it has gone from adoration/fascination to horror/fascination, frankly. And the urgency to understand what is happening to the USA is only accelerating, because of the cultural merger of UK/EU and US far right extremism.
During Trump 1 we would say, not all Americans are like that; we'd still be partitioning the USA into the ones we have some recognition for and those who make us feel queasy. We coped with Trump 1 the way we coped with GWB.
Nowadays, I believe you will find that people understand that it doesn't really matter if there are these two Americas; functionally we can no longer treat you as anything other than homogenous.
We cannot trust the USA to share our values or come to our aid even as we host military bases; a USA that can do nothing to stop Elon Musk agitating for violence on our streets is one we do not have positive feelings for, and a USA whose vice president actively denigrates our culture is just so out of the ordinary.
(And as a narrative quirk I think a lot of this has roots in the most simple of stories that illuminated it — that of Harry Dunn, Anne Sacoolas and diplomatic immunity. Trump and Mnuchin handled that so insultingly that it left a lasting impact; Biden had his work cut out to fix it.)
The last time the USA appeared to not be on our side in consequential issues to this extent is when Joseph Kennedy was ambassador. We are back there, now. Back in the late 1930s relationship with the USA that was profoundly distrustful.
It doesn't help that this is actually blended, fully, with growing distrust for the tech industry, which is the biggest cultural challenge of the next decade. We (only partially incorrectly) perceive tech culture's impositions on and disregard for British culture as being American impositions.
I think we accept now that this has happened and it will not be reset; we won't suddenly forget it all in 2029. But we still have to understand you.
I think a lot of us Yanks are having similar realizations too!
The (US) Civil War seemed like distant history in school. But I’ve come to realize there are a lot of people that still seem to live with the prejudice from those times.
The war ended but the problems never went away. Can’t help but wonder if Reconciliation was such a good idea. One half the country might be quite happy not dealing with the other.
I also used to not understand how Protestants and Catholics could fight (Ireland). Almost seems odd both being Christian. Of course, I was extremely blind to the religious divides long existing here too.
Sectarian divides are always complex if you’re the outsider, I think. Like the Troubles in Ireland, or Hutus vs Tutsis in Rwanda, or Pol Pot’s purges: from the outside it is like, how can they be so immediately sure who is who? Whereas on the inside, your membership of one or other group is always obvious: it’s a socially indelible distinction used to doom people to one or the other, and the smallness of the distinction is often the point. (MAGA vs America First could end up like this)
I used to think that people on the mainland like me could never fully and instinctively understand who was who (and why) in the Troubles. But this week, the problems in Belfast, it is somehow instinctively obvious which side of the old sectarian divide the energy behind that violence is coming from, even though arguably the so-called “justification” (immigration) affects both sides of the Troubles divide more or less equally and the supposed provocation (actually more or less a pretext) happened in an area associated with the other one.
I think most people here in the UK just knew, immediately, from the tone of it.
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.
You're arguing with people who don't understand the word Parliament in the term "Parliamentary Democracy". Just nod, tut, and move on, it will be better for your mental health.
Funnily enough I am OK about this stuff, these days.
It would be absurd to pretend that we don't have problems; we obviously have problems. And things are extremely bad right now, especially with our former transatlantic friends actively agitating the situation.
But internationally it has got a lot easier to see our problems with clarity in the last year and a half, and a lot easier to argue that every significant country has its difficulties.
They keep saying Trump has been impeached twice but he's still around. Does impeach mean something else in American English?
I don't understand why he's labelled as "impeached" when the final outcome was acquitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_T...
Sure, there is a guy with a title of King, but this isn't some medieval fairytale ruler. The British monarchy has effectively zero power over the country and its population and are simply there for historical reasons and to continue making the country a rather lovely tourist destination.
Username noted, alright your maj?
The monarchy simultaneously has zero power and all the power.
In the sense that it is the entity in whose name the government acts on behalf of the people: it's the representation of the state.
In principle, the monarch could refuse royal assent. In practice, if it did, the entire unwritten constitutional convention that preserves it would collapse.
So in practice, the monarch is the head of state in the same way that the Irish or Israeli presidencies are: it's non-executive, with relatively little indirect influence. "My government will" means "the government will". A formality.
You are absolutely correct that they still do hold the power, but don't wield it. There have been times, though, that I almost wish they would :)
That's not _quite_ right.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
As the article explains, Queen’s/King’s consent is a parliamentary decision. It is part of the balance struck; consent is always granted. If it were not, it would trigger a constitutional crisis.
This is somewhat like asking your girlfriend’s parents for permission to ask her to marry you. You are going to do it anyway; they cannot stop you. They do, however, have a bit more life experience than you and that discussion might be valuable, and it is literally tradition to ask; the process allows you to consider and discuss that things have lifelong consequences and more.
In the case of the late queen, prime ministers appeared to enjoy and value the opportunity to talk completely privately with someone who had more experience of the process than anyone else.
Is it eccentric, nuanced and odd, yes. Does it sometimes give the monarch a little time to digest changes to the royal finances or rattle on about tradition, or bend their PM’s ear about how an equerry was shadily wheel-clamped in a Windsor pub car park, yes. Could it be seriously corrupted by the monarch, maybe. Has it been? I kind of doubt it. Again, there are no lèse majesté laws. We can critique the process and prime ministers have.
Power is complicated. The British monarchy as representation of the state holds it in a form directed by government, but as they are people, they have the right to understand what they are doing. This is a balance struck over almost a thousand years.
Would I prefer a republic, yeah. Do I think our next king wonders how long the monarchy has in its current form, yes. But I think we will get to a republic over the next hundred years, shrinking the monarchy progressively in the way that other european countries have.
All of this nuance tends to confuse or annoy Americans and provoke romantic chest-beating about the power being vested in “we the people” etc. But I would contend that a lack of cultural understanding about the complexity of wielding power, and how it can be used against itself, is why the USA is in the situation it is in right now. Power is complicated and amoral; using it right is a matter of conventions as much as convictions.
He's organising a 250th birthday party, complete with an octagonal UFC ring on the White House lawns, so there's that.
s/party/rally/
Musk, Vance and Rubio are cheering for Europe to wakeup. Quite the opposite of what you say.
Explicit 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).
Hmmm... 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).
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.
I disagree. It will, it just takes a while.
There are tons of cities with burgeoning artist scenes and other movements improving that city, due to the availability of extremely inexpensive space to do things. Rochester, St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit.
Making things cheap means you can take risks or spend time on activity that's directly economically unproductive but indirectly has fringe benefits for everyone around. And as more people do it, more people try to do it, with a compounding positive effect over time.
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...
While the official youth unemployment rate in Niger is something like 0.5%, that includes things that wouldn't count by western standards (e.g. sustenance farming). The youth unemployment rate there, by how we measure it, is more like 50%. To call the situation in Japan or the USA a crisis compared to that is laughable. Yet they have a fertility rate of ~6 births per woman. You've come up with a fun theory, but it clearly doesn't work.
Fertility is on the decline, particularly in the west, although increasingly spreading, quite simply because it is socially unacceptable to have children. Society says you need to focus on your career instead. It creates TV shows, like "16 and Pregnant", designed to dissuade viewers from having children. So on and so forth. Social pressure is a powerful drug.
In fact, the pocket communities where certain religions that push a 'make babies' agenda are commonly observed, where the social pressure goes in the other direction, we find many families pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow. Social pressure works both ways, but the "having kids is cool" is not the prevailing social wind.
Dismissing youth employment as a concept because some countries still plow their fields by hand isn't a good argument. You can just look at peer countries and compare them. Surely you can’t think that youth unemployment does not reflect any major difference between Spain and Germany right.
You will find no dismissal of youth employment as a concept. There would be no reasonable way to dismiss the concept as one only has to quickly look outside to see that youth are employed. What was the intended purpose of introducing this nonsensical tangent?
Excellent post!
It's structural. A big problem is the Banks. They would rather lend for asset accumulation (rent seeking) than for production. In Canada, mortgage lending is literally zero risk as the banks are covered via CHMC against any defaults. Ultimately its the tax payer who is on the hook. Hence the massive housing-based economy.
And none of the politicians ever fix the structure because many of them are property owners.
> 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.
Where do you think the term "rent-seeking" comes from? To quote Adam Smith [1]:
> “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
In the mid 1990s, the average house price in London was under 80k. It's now pushing 700k. Are salaries 9x? No. What is this other than stealing from the next generation? Raising house prices are nother more than a massive wealth transfer from the young and working to the old and wealthy.
but here's the bigger problem. If you have essentially a guaranteed 9% return on a highly-leveraged asset with tax advantages and government guarantees, why would you invest in a factory or a business? That's the real reason manufacturing has hollowed out in the UK.
I agree with Xi: houses are for living, not speculation [2]. We should absolutely punish rampant speculation by heavily taxing land hoarding.
[1]: https://www.prosper.org.au/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
> why would you invest in a factory or a business?
Because you cannot afford to join the ranks of the investment class, so what else are you going to do with your time?
You are quite right that you are not going to build your business in London, though. You are going to take your business to places where starting a new business makes sense.
For the American audience, Detroit lived what you describe. What started as a vibrant manufacturing centre turned to property investment and soon it could no longer sustain itself. The people not benefiting from those investments there didn't throw in the towel, though. They packed their bags for what we now know as Silicon Valley and started new businesses developing the transistor. The economy wasn't killed, it moved.
> We should absolutely punish rampant speculation by heavily taxing land hoarding.
The law is to the will of the people, so this can happen on a whim, but you have to convince the people that piling everyone into a giant heap is desirable. Most people don't want to live in one giant heap. A Kowloon Walled City-esq world is a thing of nightmares for the population at large. Most people want people to move around, to make use of the entire world, not all settle in one place. These economic factors are the engine that pushes people to spread out.
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.
In spite of this, I think I'd rather live in the UK than in Mississipi.
Agreed. 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.
Especially if one is sick, a child, has skin darker than a peachy beige, or has a mother tongue other than English.
No 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.
> 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.
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!
Actual health care can fix obesity.
The USA doesn't do much of that though. It prefers medical care.
(E.g., adding a dose-dependent sin tax on food-like substances with added sugar, subsidizing real food for those on SNAP. Unpopular because who doesn't want their simple carbs?)
> USA doesn't do much of that
America does a lot of that, often quite well. It just isn’t provisioned equally, geographically or class-wise.
I dont think paternalism raises quality of life. If Mississippians want to live short, fat lives I dont see the problem.
They don't want to, any more than someone who steps into traffic carelessly wants to have a broken hip (albeit on a different time scale). That's a stunningly paternalistic view.
I dont think the people in mississippi who are fat want to have diets that are comparable to french ones. I also think shame and peer pressure play a large role in keeping people from getting fat and personally find that a terrible way to run a society. Of course, all else equal, almost no one wants to be fat, but all else is not equal.
I prefer forced beatings in the town square
I honestly don't understand this statement. What else besides healthcare could fix that? Are you arguing that Mississippi obesity is due to genetics and cannot be changed?
The only other thing I can think of that would affect state wide obesity is food security and quality. Proper healthcare would be my first pick for fixing obesity.
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
What matters is the outcomes. If nobody is able to use a world-class healthcare system (for whatever reason, could be affordability as in the US or availability as in the UK), then as a whole it's as good as no healthcare.
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.
The US has both much higher infant mortality and more gun deaths of mostly young men, which skews the life expectancies.
That being said, a relatively large proportion of US GDP is driven by healthcare, which is normally measured at cost in the UK and Europe.
About Britain:> 1/10th of the population are on a waiting list for care. 1/10th have done DIY dental work
1/10th the population of Mississippi does not have health insurance.
55% of adults in Mississippi over 65 have lost 6 or more teeth. In the UK it is about 45%.
My kids are very unlikely to get shot at school.
> 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.
Japan has less trading houses at increasingly high valuations to pump up their GDP.
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.
I live in a pretty rural, red small town USA and we have a great bus system. Disabled/elderly/sick can even call and be picked up in front of their home. Our library system is expanding in size and scope (they do a heritage seedbank now). Schools are tough to fund because the feds own most of the land and even though the deal was we lost tax revenue because federal land but that was made up for in logging/mining revenue the feds just stopped giving permits and screwed our community out of the jobs/promised revenue. Rural America isn't all the hellscape the internet pretends it is.
Where is this? Because I live in an area with what is considered one of the best public transit systems in the US and even then the bus system is iffy at the edges of the metro area. I am curious to see your bus schedule.
I get your request but I would be doxing myself and by extension people/businesses I have sometimes brought up here (some of the tech scene is kinda small).
The nice things about a small town is our edge cases aren't far from our non-edge cases so we can offer things like pickup/dropoff at home or serve them normally and not add much to routes. It was such a godsend when my mom was dying of cancer. Not sure the schedule would represent that as it is an off schedule/off published route service.
> 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.
> since The Times is a paper of record,
You misspelt "is the paper of Rupert Murdoch".
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.
Yes, cannot say highly enough of the emergency medicine. Timely and effective.
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?
The three options are NHS, private local and private Eastern Europe. On the axes of fast, cheap/cheaper, near, you can pick two.
At 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.
While true, isn't that a rich life benefit in general? E.g. Brits can choose (important hat they have options) to trade some time to get even cheaper and just as good healthcare services compared to Mississippians who don't have such an option at all. So an aggregated quality of life for Brits is even higher because of that.
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.
I didn't write the article. But it would be similar to me saying that everyone I know in the US has access to pretty good healthcare.
This is a completely bogus article and it's no surprise that the Brits are jumping in to uh complain. There's no comparison between the two areas.And to discuss the failings of the NHS and dentistry is just laughable. They're not perfect, but they're really a lot better than dying because you don't have your credit card. Nobody's ever died in the UK because they didn't have a credit card.
> but they're really a lot better than dying because you don't have your credit card
This isn't a correct characterization of US healthcare either. No one is denied lifesaving care due to inability to pay by law. In fact 92% of Americans have some kind of health insurance. Of the ~8% who are uninsured, yes many do defer routine medical care which may lead to adverse long term effects. Its a real problem. However ~70% of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid, subsidy, or employer insurance, so there's room to improve on getting those people signed up.
Technically, no-one is denied critical and emergency care due to inability to pay. Chronic diseases are ... a lot less likely to be looked after.
Unlike the NHS.
That number will decrease once Trump’s Medicaid work requirements take effect, and subsidies were also significantly reduced.> However ~70% of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid, subsidy, or employer insurance, so there's room to improve on getting those people signed up.I’d love if our government saw “room to improve” there instead of doing the exact opposite and working overtime to reduce the number of fully insured people.
The medicaid work requirement is pretty dumb, granted, but the COVID era increased demand side subsidy was a terrible policy that every healthcare economist said would cause prices to rise. The government should focus on increasing supply instead of driving more demand.
To make it worse, this is gdp per capita, a pretty worthless statistic. Someone else below points out the comparison with Japan.
Are you sure about that?
https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/06/09/emergency-room-delay...
>GDP is not a measure of living standards.
if you don't maintain per capita GDP, you will not be able to maintain living standards.
However, GDP may be measuring the opposite of living standards. In the UK, the NHS will be effectively paying cost prices for healthcare (which is generally available free to the public), whereas Mississippi will presumably factor in expensive healthcare as part of the GDP. Higher GDP, but a lower living standard if you have very limited access to healthcare.
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.
There are also those who believe the opposite. They constantly point out Scandinavian countries as somehow having solved every problem that exists in the US…despite being very different in almost every dimension one can think of.
Simplistic thinking doesn’t help.
The way I've seen Scandinavia referenced has been more of a counterpoint to dysfunctional aspects of the US having to be the way they are.
There is nothing definitively different about the US that prevents it from solving a lot of its social issues by doing the same as is done elsewhere. We know this because the social contract in the US post WW2 was quite similar to modern day Europe - e.g. 91% top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower [0].
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/15/bernie-san...
A comparison between the quality of life of someone on median income in Mississippi vs the equivalent in the UK / Germany / France would be an extremely effective counter, too.
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...
I think Europe still allows this too? https://www.aopa.lu/2025/07/18/the-production-and-supply-of-...
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.
In what way would you control for differences demographics?
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 somehow outweighs not being able to afford cars and houses.
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] 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+...
[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 was curious about comparisons like the ones you're making between US states and EU countries and made this little app, maybe you'll find it useful!
It's a good tool! That said, I also recommend looking at European (and other) nations from a subnational lens as well.
The North-South divide in Italy, the FRG/GDR divide in Germany, Northeast and Southern versus Central France, and various other representations of spatial inequality exist within Europe as well.
The reality is a Parisian, Londonian, and New Yorker have much more overlap with each other than they do with their own compatriots, yet it is this class that is overrepresented in any discourse on social and traditional media.
Thanks, I'd love to add them! Do you have a good source for this data? I did a quick look at the site you linked above and I'm not sure whether it has numbers for GDP or landmass for these regions.
This group at IMR Radboud [0] has been working on subnational inequality for over a decade
The reality is landmass and stuff doesn't matter as much as HDI which acts as a lossy indicator of development.
educating 10 years of children isn't going to erase generations of doing nothing.
From your article
>It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasizes the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test.
Holding students back a grade is how things worked previously, it leads to students dropping out of school 20%-50% for once, 80-95% for twice. They also found that any improvement in test scores fades to below average by middle school.
If a student is failing to learn the same material 180 days in a row, why would 180 more days help? For any mentally normal child 180 days is already well more than enough.
HS2 Phase 1 as a whole required 8,276 public-body consents, but those were not 8,000 permits for the bat structure.
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"
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.
You forgot neoliberalism, Bank lending to fund asset accumulation by the wealthy with no lending for asset production.
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), 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...
Not excusing the rioters in any way (especially since friends and family living in that part of Belfast are directly affected by it), but it's fair to say that a US citizen bears a great deal of responsibility for incitement.
(It's probably also unwise to view it as being racist in the American sense - instead, there's a complex set of overlapping bigotries at play. None of them are good, but it's not simply based on skin colour. Musk and his extremist friends don't understand it either, but clearly don't give a fuck.)
Not denying Elon Musk (who is an English South African immigrant btw) role and I gladly accept American far-right involvement, but there was clear organization at the local level, which is unsurprising given NI's history of paramilitaries.
It feels like just about every Brit and NIer on HN has been trying to absolve responsibility for what has become a common occurrence in the British Isles now. that to deny and absolve the very real local level organization that occurred is what irks me.
The reality is British rightwingers like Steve Hinton and Paul Marshall have also been influencing American politics just like American rightwingers have in the UK. And the UK (and Europe in general) was always a much shittier and racist experience for a BAME like me versus the US.
> It's probably also unwise to view it as being racist in the American sense
It definetly is. I have extended family who are BAME in the UK and Scandinavia, and were around during the old school BNP wave. None of this shit has changed, and acting "holier than thou" pisses us off.
Well 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.
That does not justify a pogrom and collective punishment.
And if you have true conviction in your beliefs you should use your primary HN account instead of a throwaway.
Including 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?)